I am following an Azure Resource Manager training course, provided by Microsoft MVA. I suppose it’s bad enough that EVERY demo shows stuff that no longer exists – all the demos are ‘wrong’. The new portal looks vastly different from the course, although with a bit of effort I can pretty much re-produce what the demos are showing. It’s tedious, but possible in most cases. And just for the record: the latest incarnations of the portal are very good - much better than in the MVA video.

But it’s not just the portal that is so different in the video, the cmdlets have changed too – with lots of renaming, etc. One cmdlet that is now totally gone is Get-AzureResourceGroupGalleryTemplate. This cmdlet returned a list of templates in Azure’s gallery along with details of the specific template.

So, while you can’t actually use this cmdlet (it no longer exists), you can re-create it like this:

Monday, February 01, 2016

I’ve been looking at possibly upgrading one of my Hyper-V servers to use SSDs. I don’t have the budget yet, but have been pricing up various options. One issue that arises is about the life time of the SSD, also referred to in the literature as endurance. There seems to be two separate measurements in use: Terabytes Written (TBW) an Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD). At first, I could not see the relationship – which kind of made comparing harder.

I did a little searching and found this neat article: Comparing DWPD to TBW which provides a nice equation for converting DWPD into TBW. The trick here is to consider the warranthy period. DWPD is a measure of how many times you can totally overwrite the disk each day and not have it fail during it’s warranty period. To convert that to TBW, as the artilce points out – you multipy DWPD by warranty period (in days) and capacity (in TB).

I am starting to see more virtualisation projects using SSD disks, so the comparison betwen vendors and product lines is important. I wish there was just ONE measure of endurance, but such is life.